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11 comments for “Women in Afghanistan”

Gar Howell

05/10/2011 at 7:18 pm

My great aunt was one of the first women to train as a doctor in the UK in the 1890s. She never practised. My late Ma was one of the first 50,000 or so women to vote in 1931; a few had voted in 1928.
Women teachers had to give up teaching if they had a family, until about 1935(?)

It would seem that many people of the world consider that one size Human rights law does not fit all (dashes between those words if required).There is far more diversity than it allows for at the moment, and the Pathans have very unusual tribal beliefs, which we do not respect.

Whilst the Kurds are lauded to heaven, the Pathans are condemned to…….

milesjsd

06/10/2011 at 3:35 am

… ‘helly-loo-year’ perhaps ? (GH)

milesjsd

06/10/2011 at 3:46 am

What none of us can really afford to be doing is precisely-what-the-UN-&-the Worlds’-lawlords, are doing – namely
putting a cart before the horse
by failing to publish, and maintain up-to-date, a graded List of all human Needs, and of the best-possible and affordable Hows for meeting each such need

that has to be done before trying to problem-solve and legislate allocations of “rights to satisfy, or to have-satisfied-on-one’s-behalf, any Need”
vital or otherwise.

Gar Howell

06/10/2011 at 1:04 pm

Right first time Miles! Thank you!

maude elwes

06/10/2011 at 2:01 pm

My feeling is, Afghan women are better off taking care of their own lives. Western societies have no understanding of their needs or what will bring them happiness.

Societies always fight for what is right for their people. They know what they want without interference from us.

All you have to do is trust in the Arab Spring and believe in their own abilities. Just as we do our own.

Lord Soley,
I am glad the Brits are there making life better for some Afghan women as are the Americans. The remnants of the Hindu Kush after the extermination, the remnants of the Hellenes, Socialist sypmathizing with the Soviets and others would all be able to support more feminist views. The Taliban also alienated some part of the Muslim tribal peoples. It is a struggle with no simple answer. But in isolation it is good to help the women as we can…

maude elwes

07/10/2011 at 10:19 pm

@FSW:

Do you really believe that nonsense? That the British and Americans, by bombing them to pieces, have made it better for those people and those women?

You as a yank may be pleased we are there, but I can tell you this, the British are not pleased about it one bit and want to cut loose from the whole bloody mess today. We are not the US flunkies you think we are.

Tony Blair is despised for linking us up with this American dream, that really was a get Saddam for humiliating Bush number one, as well as making a nice profit from the whole effort for himself and friends. Many of us see him as a traitor or Judas. Who should be thrown into jail for war crimes. And we trust that one day, this is what the outcome will be.

You Americans are so gullible, time you grew up and took off those ridiculous blinkers you simply refuse to remove.

Frank W. Summers III

09/10/2011 at 3:49 am

Maude Elwes,

I have many faults but gullibility in the precise sense you mean is not one of them. I do not deny that many civilians have been killed and crippled nor that being maimed by a drone is not much help in ones life. I do not deny that policy there has often been misguided. I did lose a cousin there whose verifiable name was Severin Summer and who cannot be replace.

However, Afghanistan has many historical ties to things other than that part of the cultural and religious ferment of the Islamists which was the worst of the religious filth of the Taliban regime. Lord Soley knows if he chooses to remember that he and I have profound ideological differences as do I with many others. I do believe this bloody war sends many messages that need sending as well as some I would rather not send.

Life is about struggle. Our civilization will die if it cannot struggle. Lord Soley and I represent very different parts of what sometimes must act as a community and one thing we can agree on is not treating women as the Taliban does. That can be important and part of the cause worth fighting for, time will tell where all this will lead. I am certain that if America had not gone to war with Afghanistan after 9/11 then it would have little or no promise of survival as a civilization.

Americans as a composite may have blinkers in plenty but none of them are worn by all of us. I am entirely sure that if we cannot find and devlop the moral goods we can achieve in the midst of war and relative chaos we will never taste much of the moral goods we would like to achieve in better circumstances.

Lastly, I am not happy to be there in the sense you imply. Although I am closer to it than some. I would really be gladto live in peace and have risked my own life in various countries seeking peace but I do not believe in pretending there is peace when there is no peace…

maude elwes

10/10/2011 at 3:26 pm

@FWS:

‘Oh, if we had the gift to give us, to see ourselves as others see us.’ This is not quite as Burns wrote it, but, it’s the best I can do without looking it up and pasting it.

This is not worth dying for, or, being maimed for. Never was and never will be. No matter where you are coming from, these people will always detest you for it. Including the women. Because you are killing maiming their sons and husbands. And you have no right, in any moral sense, to do it.

This is a personal money making effort for those in the arms business. And of course, for the players in the top military brass.

And, yes, you have blinkers, ones you refuse to remove. Because to remove them means, you have to face up to your guilt. Just like the Blair creature refuses to face his.

Frank W. Summers III

10/10/2011 at 11:03 pm

Maude Elwes,

I feel vastly more guilt for every day I spend coddling the Afro-Arab Islamic power than I do over my tiny complicity in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hallelujah that at least we had the Crusades, Viva la Reconquista! How beautiful it is in this vile foul world that this focus of so much evil has tasted a little Christian steel. Despising me may lead to more wars and wars to a resolution in peace that is real. Islam itself I owe more wars than I could ever fight and Islamism in the modern sense is a threat and horror beyond fantasy. That does not make Muslims unsuited to be members of the UN. It does not mean that they are not my fellow human beings nor bad people. But the British capacity for total fantasy in foreign affairs is truly boundless. I could personally commit five hate crimes against Muslims every day before breakfast until I died at some unimaginable old age and never repay my ancestral debt. I have committed not one such crime and endorse only rational and careful policy acknowledging the worth of each human but I will not live in the drivel of modern Western insanity. There are no limits to this enmity an only the character, chivalry and worth of the antagonists that one can appeal to for a better outcome.

I feel far more guilt for never having fought in open battle with an Islamist state than you can likely imagine. My pitiful tax contributions do not burden me much. But every child killed is a tragedy…

Twm O'r Nant

07/10/2011 at 8:08 pm

<p<Afghan women are better off taking care of their own lives. Western societies have no understanding of their needs or what will bring them happiness.

The real problem of difference between a western society woman and a Central Asian one, (or any other person!)is the way that everything is monetized.

We have chronic problems with divorce law but want to inflict our own warped values on societies like theirs because they are backward. Divorce law is what it is on account of completely different property ownership since WW2.

As always it is salesmanship, which compels us to tell everybody how wonderful what we have got, is, once we have got it. That is a fact of human development, possibly of human nature too.

The blight imposed on the children of the divorced… separate homes, separate ways, separate countries, conflicting advice, and so on, is a personal economic blight, on the children of those divorced people, which Baroness Deech may have raised question of here.

Arranged marriages are no less a factor of western middle class existence, in a discreet way, than they are of Pathan families, and they are frequently the ones that last.
If you met when you were ten years old and both parents were keen, it is rather difficult to imagine life without your life partner, 30 years on.

They certainly have problems with family murder though, which is again the most frequent place, the home, throughout the world, for murder to occur, and between relatives. A cultural impasse they have to solve.

I have a delightful friend from Khaza, a young lady of about 23, whom I met for 5 minutes, five years ago, and we have corresponded ever since; such good breeding, an excellent complement to the people of Khazakstan!

Compare with the abominably bad manners and habits of some of the people of these islands, born and bred here!

Humnan rights!

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About the Author

Lord Soley

…was a Labour Party MP from 1979, first for the constituency of Hammersmith North, then Hammersmith and finally Ealing, Acton and Shepherd’s Bush from 1997 to 2005. He was Chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party from 1997 to 2001. In 2005 it was announced that he would be given a life peerage, and on 29 June 2005 he was created Baron Soley, of Hammersmith in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.
He enjoys walking, photography and scuba diving. He has been blogging since 2003 and has played a leading role in developing this blog.